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Last Russian Royal Mystery Solved/Remains Found

The last Russian Czar, Nicolas II, was murdered in 1918, along with his family.
They found the bodies of all except a son and a daughter. Some amateur sleuths solved the mystery recently by walking just 70 yards away and digging.
There were several women claiming to be Anastasia thru the years and were found to be lying.
Heres a pic and heres the link. Pretty cool. I'd love to sleuth out something like that.http://news.aol.com/story/_a/russias...00010000000001

An absolutely fascinating slice of history. A great read about it: Nicholas AndAlexandra by Robert K. Massie. Details their entire lives and tragic deaths. Lots of great photos. Eerie how much Tsar Nicholas looked like his cousin, King George V of England. They could have been twins.

Rasputin can give me freaking nightmares, thinking about him and his sexual escapades and his weird influence. Ugh.

An absolutely fascinating slice of history. A great read about it: Nicholas AndAlexandra by Robert K. Massie. Details their entire lives and tragic deaths. Lots of great photos. Eerie how much Tsar Nicholas looked like his cousin, King George V of England. They could have been twins.

Rasputin can give me freaking nightmares, thinking about him and his sexual escapades and his weird influence. Ugh.

Eerie how much Rasputin looks like a skanked out Liam Neeson, I cant get over that

The book I mentioned is really very readable. There are a certain amount of political history lessons but not so much you feel like there will be a test when you finish the chapter. It's much more focused on the family and their lifestyle and their place in history.

The book I mentioned is really very readable. There are a certain amount of political history lessons but not so much you feel like there will be a test when you finish the chapter. It's much more focused on the family and their lifestyle and their place in history.

MrsW, thanks for the rec. I hate history based books that drone on and on and are borriiinngg.

My parent's had a friend(who was a therapist) He left his wife and ran off with a ballet dancer that claimed she was the last of the Romanoffs(however you spell the name)
I might add she had been put into mental health places quite a few times.

Fascinating. I can't help but think how much they suffered together at the end.

[SIZE=4]I[/SIZE]f I recall correctly from what I've read, the (mother) TSARINA ALEXANDRA (granddaughter of QUEEN VICTORIA btw) died instantly from a single gunshot wound to the forehead. NICHOLAS II also died quickly. The kids didn't fare as well. Though two fo the Grand Duchesses (OLGA & TATIANA) were killed relatively fast, the other two girls (MARIE & ANASTASIA) did not. All four had many of the family jewels sewn into their girdles and various garments. When the Bolsheviks shot them, bullets richocheted around the room. Some of the guards wondered if it was a sign of divinity in relation to the Grand Duchesses. The TSAREVICH, ALEXIS was kicked in his head as he tried to clutch onto his beloved father. The main objective of course was to kill the royals, so when the initial round of gunshots were fired the most important family members were concentrated (up)on. As the younger two Grand Duchesses lay on the floor, they were eventually killed by bayonets when the guards ran out of bullets. The female servant got the worst of the lot; none of the bullets had penetrated her and she was bayonetted to death as she moved back & forth against the wall.

The last Russian Czar, Nicolas II, was murdered in 1918, along with his family.
They found the bodies of all except a son and a daughter. Some amateur sleuths solved the mystery recently by walking just 70 yards away and digging.
There were several women claiming to be Anastasia thru the years and were found to be lying.
Heres a pic and heres the link. Pretty cool. I'd love to sleuth out something like that.http://news.aol.com/story/_a/russias...00010000000001

I always loved the mystery of this story. Even the hoaxes were fun on this one.

We saw a documentary on what you summarize here about a year ago. Very interesting stuff. It was on either the BIO channel or PBS. In any event, great story!

The Romanov Family

[SIZE=5]Execution of the Russian Royal family in 1918[/SIZE]

[SIZE=5]A full description of the Romanov murders

[/SIZE][SIZE=2]The dreadful night of July 16, 1918, at midnight the chief executioner Yakov “dark man” Yurovsky, went upstairs to awaken the family. In his pocket he had a Colt pistol with a cartridge clip containing 7 bullets, and in his coat he carried a pistol and a clip of 10 bullets. When he went and knocked on the door Dr. Bortkin, the family doctor was alert, he was already awake writing a letter which would turn up to be his last letter. Yurovsky explained his intrusion saying, “Because of unrest in the town, it has become necessary to move the family downstairs,” he said. “It would be dangerous to be in the upper rooms if there was shooting in the streets.” Botkin understood and went to awake the family and tell them to get dressed quickly. Nicholas, 50, and Alexis, 13, dressed in simple military shirts, trousers, boots, and cap. Alexandra, 46, and Olga, 22, Tatiana, 21, Marie, 19, and Anastasia, 17, put on simple dresses without outer wraps or ruffles. Nicholas carrying his son Alexis, Alexandra clutching a pillow, so as the other daughters, and Anastasia holding her small King Carles spaniel, Jimmy. Following them were Trupp, Nicholas’s valet; Demidova, the maid; and Kharitonov, the cook. From there Yurovsky led all of them downstairs, to a bare room with no furniture. Alexandra seeing the empty room asked, “No chairs? May we not sit?” Yurovsky, went out to get 2 chairs, while one of the soldiers whispered to one another “The empress needs a chair...evidently she wants to die in one.” Alexandra took one and put Alexis in the other. Then Yurovsky gave the “death directions”--“Please, you stand here, and you here..that’s it in a row!”-- spreading them out across the back wall. He explained that he needed a photograph because people in Moscow were worried that they had escaped. When he finished aligning them, Yurovsky then called in NOT photographers, but 11 armed Bolshevik soldiers. Yurovsky stood in front of Nicholas, his right hand in his pocket and left holding a paper and reading,

"In view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to......execute you."

Nicholas quickly turned looked at his family and said “What? What?” Yurovsky jerked out the Colt out of his pocket and fired at the Tsar. Soon the entire squad began to fire at the family, each of the soldiers had been told beforehand whom they were assigned to shoot and ordered to aim for the heart to avoid excessive quantities of blood. The empress and Olga each tried to make a sign of a cross as a prayer but they did not have time. Now Alexis and Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia remained alive. Bullets fired at the daughters’ chest but they seemed to bounce off, (later Historians found out the daughters sowed jewels on their dresses to act as a shield) the executioners continued to fire, in the smoke, Marie and Anastasia pressed on the wall, while Alexis grasping for support was kicked in the head by a executioner. Then the executioners stabbed Alexis, Marie, and Anastasia. Blood was everywhere.

Sheets off the beds were collected to drag out the bodies. When they picked up Anastasia’s body and put her on a sheet she cried out. She was still alive. But then she got still and they continued, till they got to a abandoned place in the dense forest called the Four Brothers. There they undressed the family and collected their items and the jewels from the duchesses to resell them in a market, as shown in the animated, movie “Anastasia”. At some point in carnage, perhaps in a attempt to make the corpses unrecognizable, the faces had been crushed by the blows from the rifle butts. While the diggers threw the bodies in the ditch, some of them, the despicable low-lives that they were, actually touched the naked bodies of the duchesses. One of them said in a interview, quote: “I felt the empress myself and she was warm” another one said “Now I can die in peace because I have squeezed the empress’s breasts”. To get rid of any evidence of carnage, bones, and a rotting corpse they chopped the bodies up into fine pieces which looked like chopped meat, ...then the bodies were destroyed with sulfuric acid and by burning on the bonfires with the aid of gasoline. The fatty matter in the corpses melted and spread over the ground where it became mixed with the earth
[/SIZE]

This is my most favorite historical story of all time. It is so captivating. The beginning of communism. When I was little I so hoped that Anastasia did escape and the claims of her life being spared were true.

That's a really great post. I've always loved the story as well. I think i remember seeing a made for TV movie when I was very young. Had to be in the early 80's about the murdered family. I also had hopes that someone escaped.

Well, if you believe (as, sadly, I do) that the 9 skeletons found in 1991, and the missing 2 that were found only recently, are the REAL dead Tsar's family & retainers, then it's obvious that attempts to destroy the bodies failed almost completely. Indeed, after trying to eradicate 2 of the dead, after which they buried the efforts, the murderers dug a huge ditch right in the road nearby, and dumped the rest in there, running over the muddy dirt over and over until nobody coming upon it would recognize it as a grave. The wet ground actually caused adipocere formation on at least one of the bodies (ID'd, IIRC, as the large-bellied Dr. Botkin) which was still evident over 70 years later, and may have contributed to the preservation of the dog Jimmy, found in another pit with some of the burnt clothes and broken jewelry. So much for the whole obscene butchery scene, which was promoted largely by anti-Semitic, anti-Communist propoganda. The murders of a defenseless family with minor children, and servants whose only fault was loyalty to their employers, was horrible enough as it occurred, without the added fictional details.

I believe their story is being covered in tonights "Post Mortem Autopsy" with Dr, Michael Baden on HBO @ 9pm Eastern Standard Time

It was! Although there was no mention of the recent discoveries of the other bodies, which they are fairly sure include those of Anastasia and Alexei. I would think with the DNA tests already done on the other bodies, that they can determine who is who with fair certainty. I'm wondering if the show was either filmed before this development or if they didn't mention it in case the investigation was inconclusive.

I also find this both extremely tragic and fascinating. Obviously, the social system under the Czar was extremely unfair and cruel for those who weren't nobility, but the rage inflicted on the entire family and their servants and friends was inexcusable! I wonder how many psycho types had a field day in the upheaval of the revolution.

They were very beautiful and it makes you wonder......hopefully they did kill them all and the girls were spared rape...allthough its never mentioned it the story of what happened that night I wouldent put it past the rats these guys were....to do that to a child! Also I was lucky enough to see some of their belonings when they came here in 98 I think.....It was amazing......poor people

It's extremely eerie that the Czar looked so much like his British cousin King George. Who, I might add, totally ignored Nicholas' pleas for assistance and shined him on. They could have been twins.

Alexandra was beautiful, as were the girls.

Regardless of the politics, they brought a lot to culture in the former USSR; the art alone, oh my. I saw that exhibit as well, Lisa Marie. Just beautiful exquisite things. So sad to think of where they had come from.

DNA Confirms IDs of Czar's Children

I saw on Yahoo News today that they've confirmed those last two bodies found recently are indeed the last two "missing" Romanov family members (edited slightly from the Yahoo article, taking out history of family and Church's canonization of the Czar):

MOSCOW - DNA tests carried out by a U.S. laboratory prove that bone fragments exhumed last year belong to two children of Czar Nicholas II, putting to rest questions about what happened to Russia's last royal family, a regional governor said Wednesday.

Bone fragments dug up near the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg are indeed those of Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Maria, whose remains had been missing since the family was murdered in 1918 as Russia descended into civil war, said Eduard Rossel, governor of the Sverdlovsk region.

"We have now found the entire family," he told reporters in Yekaterinburg, 900 miles east of Moscow.

The remains of Nicholas, Alexandra and three of their daughters were unearthed in Yekaterinburg in 1991 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. After genetic tests convinced forensics experts of their authenticity, they were buried in 1998 in a cathedral in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg.
The remains of Alexei and Maria, however, had never been located, leading to decades of speculation that perhaps one or both had survived.

Last summer, researchers dug up the bone shards near Yekaterinburg and enlisted Russian and U.S. laboratories to conduct DNA tests.
"The main genetic laboratory in the United States has concluded its work with a full confirmation of our own laboratories' work," Rossel told reporters. "This has confirmed that indeed it is the children.

It was unclear which laboratory Rossel was referring to but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process.

So it was Maria who was missing this whole time and not Anastasia? Well damn, that just totally ruins the cartoon movie Anastasia for me. I love that movie. Meg Ryan and John Cussack did a great job but the best was Bartok the bat. *Sigh* Now I'll be forced to yell "Too bad Anastasia didn't escape!" and "You're actually Maria." the whole time.

[SIZE=4]I[/SIZE]f I recall correctly from what I've read, the (mother) TSARINA ALEXANDRA (granddaughter of QUEEN VICTORIA btw) died instantly from a single gunshot wound to the forehead. NICHOLAS II also died quickly. The kids didn't fare as well. Though two fo the Grand Duchesses (OLGA & TATIANA) were killed relatively fast, the other two girls (MARIE & ANASTASIA) did not. All four had many of the family jewels sewn into their girdles and various garments. When the Bolsheviks shot them, bullets richocheted around the room. Some of the guards wondered if it was a sign of divinity in relation to the Grand Duchesses. The TSAREVICH, ALEXIS was kicked in his head as he tried to clutch onto his beloved father. The main objective of course was to kill the royals, so when the initial round of gunshots were fired the most important family members were concentrated (up)on. As the younger two Grand Duchesses lay on the floor, they were eventually killed by bayonets when the guards ran out of bullets. The female servant got the worst of the lot; none of the bullets had penetrated her and she was bayonetted to death as she moved back & forth against the wall.

I love the history of Czar Nicholas and his family, its sort of heartbreaking, I think they were good people who was murdered by their country,

Back in the 70's I remember seeing a movie about the family. Never forget the family murder scene.

But Crown Prince Alexei, the movie as I recall showed a few scenes where he actually tried a few times to either kill and/or hurt himself on purpose.
One scene I remember ( I could have left something out here since the last time I saw the movie was in 1979 ). Alexei used a sled and rolled down a flight of stairs to crash against a wall. Why?

Maybe I should do some research and try to find the name of this movie.